Exclusive ’13 Hours’ Featurette Stresses the Influence of John Tiegen on Production

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghaziis the third time that director Michael Bay has taken on a true story and shaped the material into a thrilling action spectacle. Last time, he took a small-scale Florida crime spree and turned it into Pain & Gain, arguably his best film to date, and years earlier, he put an epic spin on one of America’s darkest days in Pearl Harbor.

With 13 Hours, he’s looking to depict the actions of private security officers who were on the ground in Libya when the well-known tragic events in Benghazi unraveled in 2012, following an attack on the American embassy by Islamic militants. From the look of things, this looks to be one of Bay’s more thoughtful and tense works, and he clearly took the depiction of these skilled heroic men, who are played by a cast that includes John Krasinski, James Badge Dale, Pablo Schreiber, and David Denman, very seriously.

To underline that, he had John “Tig” Tiegen, who was part of the GRS team at the center of 13 Hours, on set to not only give notes to actor Dominic Fumusa, who portrays Tiegen in the film, but to also help give the entire production a sense of realistic detail. In this exclusive featurette from the film, the cast talks about what it was like to have Tiegen, an experienced marine who had worked in Libya before the attack, on set and Tiegen talks about his experience of working with Bay, his cast, and the crew to bring the story to life.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi will be released in theaters nationwide on January 15th. You can also check out Steve’s interview with Bay on the making of the film, digital filmmaking, and his work on the next Transformers film right here. You can check out the featurette right below:

COLLIDER participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means COLLIDER gets paid commissions on purchases made through our links to retailer sites. Our editorial content is not influenced by any commissions we receive.